When he was in his first job, a junior chef at La Normandie in Birtle, near Bury, where he grew up, Simon Hopkinson was already a bit special. After a punishing night in the kitchen in what was the most notable French restaurant north of the Peak District, the 17-year-old Hoppy, would invariably make himself a little treat. One of the signature dishes of La Normandie’s bullying chef-patron, the diminutive Yves Champeau, was a light pancake filled with asparagus and Bayonne ham. Well after midnight when he had done another full shift and helped clean up the kitchen, Hopkinson would slip a couple of these pancakes – they didn’t keep overnight anyway, he insists – into his pocket along with a lemon. Back in the staff flat he would scoff the pancakes, but never, ever before he had whipped up a perfect hollandaise sauce to go with them – much to the amusement of the other knackered line cooks who just wanted to crash out. “The pancakes weren’t half as good without the sauce,” Hopkinson recalls. “So I always did it – that’s why I took the lemon.”
If the true test of vocation is never to compromise even when no one is watching, then Hopkinson is a genuine artist. He lives on his own, and people sometimes ask him how often he bothers to cook. He looks at them in alarm. He is always cooking and it is never a bother. Over lunch the other week at his current favourite neighbourhood restaurant, Six Portland Road, in west London, I asked him what he had been up to in the past few days.
He talked me conspiratorially through a delicious sounding stewed aubergine and tomato dish he had made with lots of onion and cumin and green chilli. And then about the dals he has lately been experimenting with. And about a particular Asian greengrocer on the Uxbridge Road where he has been going to buy bundles of parsley, dill, coriander, and how he will whizz up the dill with sugar and salt and a bit of gin to make gravadlax when he’s got some nice salmon. And how he will blanch the parsley and mix it with garlic and butter and blitz it and freeze that, so he will always have some garlic butter to hand. And then about the coley he had bought the other day in Shepherd’s Bush market and salted in sel de Guérande, “that lovely grey salt”, for 48 hours and washed it down this morning, in order to dry it and “let it get stinky” to make some baccala, which would normally be cod, but he thinks it will work. Four quid for the lot! And about the bags of chicken feet he buys for stock. “I just love having all the things you would have in a restaurant kitchen around me,” he says. “The wherewithal.”
The temptation when looking at the facts of Hopkinson’s brilliant career is to see it as something of a game of two halves. For the first two decades he was the cook’s cook: youngest to gain an Egon Ronay star at the Shed in west Wales; celebrated for his convivial brilliance at Hilaire on the Old Brompton Road; and then creator of the irresistible menu at Bibendum, the defining London restaurant of the late 1980s and early 1990s, where he was a partner with Sir Terence Conran and Paul Hamlyn. Hopkinson left Bibendum in 1995 when he was 40, and has spent the years since in a different kind of life – writing with great warmth and precision about the food he loves, in a column for the Independent and a series of books, the first of which, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, was properly acclaimed as “the most useful cookbook of all time” by the readers of Waitrose Food Illustrated, and by just about anyone else who has had the pleasure of reading and cooking from it.
The way Hoppy sees it, he has never stopped cooking, he just now does it mostly in his own kitchen. There was a storied “mini breakdown” during the last months of his time at Bibendum, when he once briefly walked out of the kitchen during service, but what man of passion hasn’t had the odd long night of the soul? “The fact was I was done with Bibendum a while before it ended for me,” he says. “I was no longer where I needed to be,” – by which he means, in front of a stove, with a tableful of fresh ingredients. Retreating from a professional kitchen brought him closer to the lives of those cooks he most admired. Richard Olney, the American who had made French cooking his whole way of life in the south of France, and Elizabeth David, who had first defined and shared a similar path of devotion.
Both cooks had become friends of Hopkinson at Hilaire and Bibendum. In as great a compliment as he could have received, David used to eat in the latter two or three times a week. “I think the first time Elizabeth came to Hilaire,” he recalls, “she was with Valerie Eliot, the widow of the poet. I had made this very small amount of intense shellfish consomme from some langoustine shells. And I sent her out a bowl. It was perfection. Crystal clear and intensely shellfishy. Pascal, the waiter, came back and said she would like another. That was very exciting,” he laughs. “We are allowed a few of those moments.”
From Olney, Hopkinson imbibed and developed his innate sense of proper food as worth spending a great deal of time and pleasure over. He recalls Olney’s wake at his Provençal home. “We drank, of course, only Romanee-Conti and La Tache.” There was a hard-won simplicity about everything Olney made, all achieved in his own simple kitchen. “He knew more about French cooking than almost anyone and he had never had a restaurant of his own.”
Taking a lead from both Olney’s The French Menu Cookbook and David’s style, Hopkinson has found his own way of writing about food that always feels like he is at your shoulder, tasting sauces, discussing possibilities. “It’s not a science experiment, I hope, it’s ‘let’s chat about food’,” he says. “I like a talked-through recipe. Editors might insist you have to put in the odd ‘200g’ or something, but that is never how I cook.” People say to him on holiday “Shall we do this or that recipe?” he says. He tends to suggest they go to the market and get some good fish and think what might go with it.
That sense of adventure was created in him young, he believes. He emphasises his parents’ influence frequently, particularly the family camping holidays in Spain. The bowls of mussels and the little bony fish and the custard-filled donuts on the beach and exquisite smell of a blackened shell of a prawn. His father brought a paella pan back to Lancashire from the first of those jaunts in 1963. His mum used to flirt with Mr Taylor on the fish stall at Bury market where they would give you a bunch of parsley with your hake. Hopkinson went off to the choir school at St John’s College, Cambridge until his voice broke, by which time he was aware of his calling. “I was already greedy for food,” he says.
He’s currently, slowly, writing a memoir which, given his gift for storytelling and his emotional honesty, will be worth waiting for. The book will take in the years in Wales, when he first came out, and made the decision to move to London for the freedom to be more easily himself; his three years as an Egon Ronay critic; and the years in the 1990s when he became something of a Soho fixture, playing poker at Groucho’s with Stephen Fry and Keith Allen until five in the morning.
If he has something of a quieter life now, he’s not grumbling.
“Do you know, my favourite thing of all back then was getting to the restaurant early and getting all the mise en place ready,” he says. “And then not being quite sure what I was going to cook until about 11 o’clock. Then hand-writing a little menu. I would get to when the first customer came at 12.30 and I would want to go home then. I loved the preparation. I could still do that. I would go into a back kitchen and fillet all the fish and do the butchery. That’s the joy of it, the anticipation,” he smiles, leans in. “You know, I was in Waitrose the other day and they had four herrings so fresh they were still curled up a bit. I said, ‘Bloody hell!’ The boy on the counter agreed he had never seen them so fresh. I bought the lot and went home and filleted and pickled them,” he grins at the thought. “That was such a lovely Saturday morning! What could be better?”
